Less than three weeks after being sworn in, in mid-June India’s new
prime minister, Narendra Modi, made his first visit to an operational military
unit, the newly commissioned aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya, deployed in the Arabian Sea. In being the first prime
minister to visit the navy before the army or air force, Modi highlighted a new
maritime attentiveness in a country that has traditionally focused on its contested
northern land borders.

The Indian Navy is growing in size, reach and operational sophistication
and the Indo-Pacific region is keenly aware of this. In April, China’s navy
chief, Admiral Wu Shengli, made a courtesy visit to an Indian frigate, INS Shivalik, which was visiting China’s
Qingdao naval base for exercises to mark the 65th anniversary of the
People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). Amidst the bonhomie, Admiral Wu sprang a surprise on the Shivalik’s commanding officer by requesting a tour of the frigate’s
combat information centre, its operational heart. The skipper politely rebuffed
the request.

The Chinese admiral would probably be even more interested in touring
INS Kolkata, a 7,200-tonne destroyer
that will be commissioned into the Indian Navy in July, with two sister vessels
to come into service within a year. Also on the anvil in Mazagon Dock Ltd (MDL)
– India’s premier warship-building yard – are four more destroyers, which will
begin delivery in 2018. MDL and Kolkata-based shipyard Garden Reach
Shipbuilders and Engineers Ltd will also build seven stealth frigates, the
first of which will enter service by 2020. Meanwhile, Russia has offered to
supply three more Krivak III-class frigates,
as a follow-up to six such vessels supplied in the decade before 2023. At the
same time, six Scorpene conventional
attack submarines are under construction in MDL and there is an impending tender
for another six submarines with air-independent propulsion systems. These
warships will form part of a 160-ship navy, including the ninety capital
warships envisioned by New Delhi in its Maritime Capability Perspective Plan
for 2012–27.

The country’s 7,500-kilometre coastline – and the geostrategic advantage
offered by a peninsula extending 1,000 kilometres into the Indian Ocean – facilitates
the Indian Navy’s dominance of the 5,000 kilometres of international sea-lanes
that pass through these waters. These carry much of the world’s oil and bulk
cargo – 60,000 vessels annually, or one every nine minutes – between the Straits
of Hormuz and Malacca. Both Beijing and New Delhi know that the advantages enjoyed
by China on the Himalayan land frontier between the two countries – due to easy
approaches from the high Tibetan plateau and well-developed transport networks –
could be countered by an Indian blockade of Chinese shipping.

Further improving India’s position in this regard are two strategically invaluable
island chains: the Lakshadweep archipelago in the Arabian Sea and the Andaman
and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Here, India has raised the
tri-service Andaman and Nicobar Command, with its own land forces, warships and
a fighter base on Car Nicobar Island. In 2012, this was supplemented with a second
air base, INS Baaz, whose 10,000-foot runway will soon allow Indian fighters to
comprehensively dominate the nearby Malacca Strait.

It is therefore no surprise, therefore, that India was singled out as a
key partner in the US’s ‘rebalancing’ to the Asia-Pacific, first announced in
2011. The Indian Navy’s role as the gatekeeper of the Indian Ocean is also acknowledged
by the UK, Russia, France, Japan and Australia, with which it regularly
conducts joint exercises.

Yet there is
growing evidence that many of India’s newest warships are unfit for combat.
Thanks to poor planning, the Scorpene
submarines under construction will begin joining the fleet in 2016 without their
primary armament, the Black Shark torpedo. Not one of the twenty-five capital
warships built in the last seventeen years is equipped with towed array sonars
– essential for detecting enemy submarines shielded by unusual temperature
gradients in the warm, shallow waters of the Arabian Sea. Allegations of
corruption continuing to delay procurement of these systems.

Meanwhile, the
Kolkata-class destroyers are
vulnerable to anti-ship missiles because its Israeli-Indian-built, long-range
surface-to-air missile continues to experience delays. The aircraft carrier INS
Vikramaditya is also awaiting this missile,
with several older warships that deploy the Barak anti-missile system just as
vulnerable given that, for years, New Delhi has failed to buy replacement
missiles. While all of these systems will undoubtedly be fitted some day, until
then, these vessels will be sitting ducks in combat situations.

If this were not bad enough, a spate of accidents on front-line warships
has raised concerns about operational safety procedures and sparked murmurs of a
leadership crisis. In August last year, a Kilo-class
submarine, INS Sindhurakshak, sank in
Mumbai harbour after an unexplained explosion killed all eighteen crew members on
board, and led to fire damage to the INS Sindhughosh,
parked alongside it. In December, a day after the navy chief, Admiral D K
Joshi, dismissed safety concerns, the minesweeper INS Konkan was gutted in a major fire. Days later, INS Talwar, one of the navy’s newest
frigates, sank a fishing trawler after a collision, leading to the commanding
officer being relieved. In February, a fire aboard yet another Kilo-class submarine, INS Sindhuratna, killed two officers and injured
seven sailors.

The resignation of Admiral Joshi, who accepted moral responsibility for
the spate of accidents, presented the government with a scapegoat – an apparent
relief, given its focus on the ongoing general election campaign. Yet, seemingly
oblivious to the urgent need for stable leadership to address these issues, the
government then dithered for more than fifty days before naming Vice Admiral R K
Dhowan as the new navy chief in April.

Opinion is sharply divided within the navy about the cause of so many
accidents. Predictably, there is denial, with many officers arguing that an
organisation that operates at a high tempo, clocking 12,000 ship-days annually
in often hazardous conditions, is inherently vulnerable to material failure,
equipment malfunction, human error or just force
majeure. In a service where warship captains have ultimate responsibility,
there is concern that ‘witch-hunts’ following every mishap might create a
culture in which commanding officers are reluctant to take even the slightest
risk. As one admiral pithily put it, ‘Ships sometimes collide; desks never do’.

Yet there are also sober voices that acknowledge the need for a more
critical and realistic appraisal, with the new navy chief pledging to ‘promot[e]
safety consciousness in the Navy’, ordering extensive checks on weapon-related
safety systems and reviews of standard operating procedures, especially on
submarines.

Meanwhile, other accounts suggest that warship safety procedures may
have suffered due to a greater focus on internal security. To launch the terrorist
attack on Mumbai in November 2008, Lashkar-e-Taiba fighters had sailed in from
Karachi, in Pakistan. In the aftermath of the attack, New Delhi handed the
Indian Navy responsibility for coastal security, despite India’s territorial
waters being under the jurisdiction of the civil police and, further out, the
coast guard. Consequently, the navy’s attention was diverted to policing,
coastal patrolling, radar surveillance, and establishing the control centres
and communications links needed to bring the entire coastal security organisation
onto a common grid. Safety procedures were one of the casualties of this shift
in the navy’s priorities away from blue-water operations.

Now, however, the navy is once again focused on its conventional tasks
and capabilities, if somewhat belatedly. Of the fourteen submarines currently
in service, no more than seven to eight are operationally available at any
time. The long-term submarine-building plan of 1999 envisaged constructing twenty-four
submarines in thirty years, but not one has yet been delivered. Meanwhile, the
first of the six Scorpene submarines under
construction will only be commissioned in late 2016, with the remaining five
following at nine-month intervals. The next six submarines await government
sanction, and although INS Chakra – an
Akula-class, nuclear-propelled attack
submarine leased from Russia – will help to fill this operational void, there
is unquestionably a serious shortfall in submarines for a navy that might seek to
blockade the world’s busiest maritime highway.

The admirals are also scrambling to make up deficiencies in the surface
fleet. While there are forty-five naval ships at
various stages of construction, a 2010 report by the government’s top
auditor revealed that the navy has just 44 per cent of the destroyers and 61
per cent of frigates it needs, and just 20 per cent of its planned requirement
of corvettes. Since then, the defence budget has fallen to only 1.74 per cent
of GDP, the lowest level since 1962. Finally, of this year’s $37-billion
defence outlay, the navy’s share is 15.6 per cent; and while this looks healthy
in absolute terms, high domestic inflation and a weak rupee circumscribe what that
money can buy. Naval planners are thus waiting to see whether the new
government will allocate more money to their projects in its July budget.

Aware of these limitations, planners carefully downplay talk of a larger
regional role and of the country being part of a US-led, anti-China grouping.
In their public statements, navy chiefs declare that India’s ‘primary areas of
interest’ are confined to the Indian Ocean. While acknowledging the Pacific
Ocean and the South China Sea as areas of concern, admirals are careful to add,
as Admiral Nirmal Verma did in 2012, that there are no plans for ‘activation’
in those areas.

China, meanwhile, despite its clear discomfort with New Delhi’s renewed
focus on the Indian Ocean, has refrained from assuming too overt a presence in
the area in response. In fact, the PLAN’s only serious forays have been in the
context of anti-piracy operations off Somalia, in which it co-operated with the
Indian Navy.

Indeed, while there is much breathless indignation in New Delhi about
China surrounding India with a ‘string of pearls’ – a garrotte of naval bases
in countries like Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan – it is clear
that China’s attention is currently centred on the eastern Pacific and its
proximate waters, where strong maritime challenges are emerging from the US and
from neighbours with whom China has longstanding territorial disputes. As such,
despite the problems facing the Indian Navy, the fundamental determinants of
naval power – force levels and proximity – suggest that it does not yet face a
credible challenge from China in its oceanic backyard. To ensure that this
remains the case, the Indian Navy will have to speed up warship building and
streamline its weapons-development processes --- as well as resolve the safety
issues that have reflected so negatively on an otherwise well-regarded force.

List of recent accidents (as placed before parliament)

INCIDENT

DATE

STATUS OF INQUIRY

Fire on board INS Virat.

22.09.2013

The Board of Inquiry (Bol) Proceedings
are under examination at Naval HQ.

Fire onboard INS Konkan.

04.12.2013

The Bol proceedings are under examination
at Naval HQ.

Scraping of INS Tarkash Ship side on SBW
Knuckle.

19.12.2013

The Bol proceedings are under examination
at Naval HQ.

Accident of INS Talwar with unlit fishing
boat.

23.12.2013

Disciplinary action being taken against
four officer and two sailors found culpable by the BoI.

Crack on sonar dome of INS Betwa.

08.01.2014

The Bol proceedings are under examination at
Naval HQ.

Suspended movement of INS Sindhughosh
while securing to alongside berth.

17.01.2014

The Bol is in progress at HQWNC.

Sea water increase into tiller flat
through a crack / hole in ship side of INS Vipul.